The Confluence editor is TERRIBLE. What can be done for cloud/hosted customers?

This is a question you should always ask yourself. It is clear that the Confluence editor team has never seriously considered this.

The Confluence editor regularly creates 12 times as much work for me than a plain text document. Where possible I write documentation on Stack Overflow or create a gist on github and link to that. I have many unfinished documents that never get published because I can't get the formatting to not suck.

What can be done? Why does Atlassian not do something about this? There is no way that they use internally, what I am paying for, without hating it.

11 comments

There's always room for feedback, and room for improvement. Cloud has some limitations because of the way Atlassian maintains and upgrades that environment. The need there is to be consistent across many instances.

Have you thought about providing the founders feedback? You might get a response - but certainly, I'd suggest proposing a solution with your feedback so they can take that back to the team and make change happen.

The bug is that no WYSIWYG editor has ever worked. They all fail. A rich text document is a data structure. We need to be able to see and edit that data structure in order to effectively communicate our intend to the rendering engine. If that data structure is Markdown, let us see and edit the Markdown. If that data structure is HTML, XML, or something more unintelligible, we need to be able to edit that (however, you may want reconsider how you store your data).

What you must not do is rely on inference of intent. You cannot accurately infer. You must empower us to tell you our intent.

We introduced the rich-text editor as the only way to edit content back in 2011. Our goal then, which is unchanged today, is to ensure Confluence is suitable for everyone in an organisation. We found that editing markup was the number one barrier to adoption.

Before we maintained a dual-editor experience (rich text vs markup) and it caused huge issues for our customers, had even more bugs, and prevented us from introducing advanced editing features.

We still believe we made the best decision based on the feedback we received from the majority of our customers over the years. The rich-text editor is our path going forward.

We know that it our editor isn't perfect, but we are committed to improving it to ensure all teams can collaborate in Confluence.

I strongly disagree with your assessment. The removal of the wiki markup editor was a HUGE problem for us and has greatly increased the time it take for us to create our content.

If the dual editor has more bugs that is not the user's fault. That is Atlassian's problem and we should not suffer because of your inability to fix those bugs.

I'm sure some users like the new editor, but please don't generalize by saying that this is suitable for everyone because it certainly is not.

Also, your user community board blew up back in then, just as it did a few months ago when you changed the interface for the Cloud users. Unfortunately, your Atlassian's response was the same back then as it was this time around - a little lip service and just allowed time to pass so it would die down.

I don't care about wikimarkup versus anything else. What I care about is precision. If I, as an engineer, cannot specify to your application precisely where I want formatting to start and end, then your editor is not suitable for everyone. I would posit that it is not suitable for anyone because I don't know anyone who will exert as much effort to solve a problem as I do. This editor is suitable only to those who settle for what they cannot change. If you want your tools to be accepted by people who write software for a living, you cannot say to them, "those same pseudo-technical people you argue with in meetings were struggling with the editor so we brought it down to their level by stripping away what made it useful to you.

By the way, if I want to insert an inline code block, I'm going to do it whether your tool allows me to or not.

If I want lists

with lists inside them

with lists inside them

Yo Dawg!

That's exactly

what I'll get

What I'm trying to say is that it is in your best interest that you find a way to empower others and make life easier on people like me while you are at it.

BTW, in order to get things as simple as <code> blocks for the inline code block above, I had to use Chrome Developer Tools to edit the DOM of the TinyMCE iframe. Some changes require that I alter the tinyMCE javascript object in memory to edit the valid_children, valid_classes, valid_elements, and valid_styles. It should not be this difficult.

I guess this has become of less importance for Atlassian. We see the WYSIWYG editors all over the place, MS Teams is one of those which cannot handle a simple code block anymore. A selling point for CEO-level PPT/Excel operators.

My company is transitioning away from Confluence for technical docs. We are going to use reST, Git, and Sphinx to generate the documentation anyway we like. Partially but not entirely because Confluence has become a time hog and a source of frustration.

I'm still after 5 years of using Confluence from time to time at various places confused why I always get an extra space character at the beginning of a cell in a table. Is that a feature or a bug?

I still like Bitbucket though, hope Atlassian can focus on that one! :)

Could not agree more with these sentiments. One of our project managers has begun an initiative to migrate our github wiki pages to confluence, and the contrast between the two editors, in both ease of use and features, is staggering.

We just use Google Docs for collaboration and use Confluence cloud to publish. However, we are looking at other options as we keep running into unforeseen obstacles - base functionality are paid for add-ons, just learned anonymous access to Confluence doesn't play well with Jira access, etc.

So, there were text entry experts who used markup to get their work done and novices who tried to use markup because the WYSIWYG editor was unusable. And Atlassian's solution to the novices' frustration was to remove markup to focus on WYSIWYG? Best case scenario: the novices are happy, and the experts get can't their work done. It's mind-boggling.

I want to edit my documents in Vim. No WYSIWYG will come anywhere close in convenience. Especially not a laggy web app.

- When I have a list and I want to remove the indentation of 1 line, it transfers my current line to the previous line. Even if the line above is a code block. It transfers the line INTO the code block. Why would anyone want that? A code block should be a self-contained thing and nothing to do with the rest of the text.

- Inside a code block when trying to select everything with the all known global shortcut cmd + a, it selects everything in the entire page. Why? Just why???? Again it should be a self-contained thing.

- Trying to indent something with tab does not work and you rotate with all the functions in the toolbar. But only when you have an indentation then it does work.

- Lists are just awful. When editing a list it does nothing that you think it does. Backspacing on a bullet point, let's go to the previous line (wtf). And when you try to undo that, it undoes the previous 4 changes that you made.

- The shortcuts for deleting words (alt + backspace) and deleting lines (cmd + backspace) never behave as you want. Deleting lines does not clear the bullet point and deleting words does not adhere to most common word breaks.

I can go on but I'm having a hard time not to curse and scream when thinking about it. It takes me sooooo long to format it. I understand for your average Joe it might work but I don't know if your average Joe is the one you should focus one. I really don't know how people work with this or if the creators even try it themselves. Even writing in HTML is faster and easier than this.

This is not a complicated document structure by any means, I remember being taught how to create document drafts in this manner at around 10 years old in school. If I had been forced to use this editor, I would have failed that unit.

The WYSIWYG editor is total garbage. This debacle has been going on for years! Shameful. Better tools must exist at this point (then anything by Atlassian, if they continue to inflict this editor upon us.)